what I have decided is the Big Job to be done at this point in the timeline is the rejoining of psychedelia and the avant-garde. When I look at psychedelia as a Famous Poet I despair. I think, my God, this is completely bankrupt. It's stalled. It's the Pantheon Bar from Mount Analogue/The Holy Mountain. It's the gift stores that cluster round at the bottom of the path that leads to the shrine. It's tacky and hackneyed and littered with dead forms and retrograde practice, glow in the dark Ganeshes, dream-catchers, Tie-dye T-shirts and Alex Grey posters, rave flyers from 1992.
No Sophisticated Operator is going to want to go near that.
When I look at what remains of the avant-garde as an Ancient Mariner and psychonaut I'm even more horrified. It's the performative connoisseurship of Cafe Oto with it's fine Japanese whiskies and it's craft beers. It's/ real ale drinking, grouchy old men arguing about Adorno, purple Alex Ferguson noses, broken veins, pot bellies. It's Goldsmiths students posturing on social media, pale skin, monkish shaved heads, pursed, priggish lips, beanies and big round glasses.
No psychically and emotionally healthy(ish) person is going to want to be anywhere near those grotesques.
The avant-garde has lost it's animating principle, it's reason for being, it's motivation, has become a deracinated aesthetic/intellectual game and niche market and psychedelia has become an enclosed space, a recapitulation of old experiences without the means to make it new, the means to make it live and breathe again.
Both have become unhygenic and unattractive backwaters, cut off from the moving current. In their current form they both disgust me. Apart neither means anything. The culture can't start moving again until they're rejoined.